I. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to computer adaptive testing. More specifically, but not exclusively, the present disclosure relates to methods for improving test efficiency and accuracy by providing a procedure for extracting information from an examinee's responses to pretest items for use in construct estimation in a Computer Adaptive Test (CAT).
II. Description of the Prior Art
In a Computer Adaptive Test (CAT), pretest items may be imbedded in the test but not intended necessarily to make a contribution to the estimation of the examinee's latent construct. Typically, pretest items are embedded in a CAT but examinee responses to the pretest items are not used in item selection or scoring; generally only examinee responses to operational items are used in item selection or scoring. Thus, the information contained in the examinee's responses to the pretest items is underutilized or even wasted.
Therefore, it is a primary object, feature, or advantage of the present disclosure to use valuable information in the examinee's responses to the pretest items, which may be used together with the information in the examinee's responses to the operational items for construct estimation.
In a CAT, the next item administered to an examinee can be selected based on the examinee's interim ability score which can be estimated using responses to the operational items administered thus far and the interim ability estimate is updated after the administration of each operational item.
Therefore, it is a primary object, feature, or advantage of the present disclosure to improve efficiency and final score estimation for a CAT by providing a more accurate interim ability score, which means a more informative next item can be selected for administration to the examinee.
It is another object, feature, or advantage of the present disclosure to use pretest information to provide improved interim ability score estimation, to fine-tune a test, for example, by making a test shorter or more accurate and thereby more effective.
Still another object, feature, or advantage of the present disclosure provides for using examinee responses to pretest items in interim ability scoring.
The obstacle of counting on pretest items for construct estimation is that the item parameters are not in place when they are administered. Technically, the pretest item parameters could be estimated on the fly (i.e., in real time during test administration) and updated right after being exposed to a new examinee, but the response sample size is smaller than in the standard practice for calibration. Small sample sizes could lead to large error in the estimated item parameters. The uncertainty of the item parameters of pretest items discourages their use in construct calculations.
Therefore, another object, feature, or advantage of the present disclosure uses weighted interim score calculations to control the error impact when including pretest items in construct estimation.
One or more of these and/or other objects, features or advantages of the present disclosure will become apparent from the specification and claims that follow.